Those who read this blog semi-regularly may have noticed that I’m a bit obsessed with the weather. Actually, I’m obsessed with global warming. Small wonder, when I read things like this from the Dec. 12 edition of the New Yorker:
“America’s failure to ratify Kyoto is widely viewed as a scandal. The Administration’s effort to block a post-Kyoto agreement has received less attention, but is every bit as dangerous. Without the participation of the United States, no meaningful agreement can be drafted for the post-2012 period [when Kyoto lapses], and the world will have missed what may well be the last opportunity to alter course. ‘If we don’t get a serious program in place for the long term in this post-Kyoto phase, we simply will not make it,’ Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton, told reporters last month. ‘We will be crossing limits which will basically produce impacts that are unacceptable.’ Such is the nature of global warming that the problem is always further along than it seems. The kinds of changes that are now becoming evident–the rise in sea levels, the thawing of permafrost, the acidification of the oceans, the acceleration of ice streams–mean that much larger changes are rapidly approaching. To continue to delay is not to put off catastrophe but, rather, to rush toward it.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert
Just over a week ago in my home town of Smithers, B.C., it hit 14 degrees during the day. When I was growing up the thermometer routinely dipped below 30 below for days at a time at this time of year. It almost never gets that cold anymore and it certainly doesn’t stay that cold. Vast forests across northern BC are infected with the pine beetle, an intruder from warmer climes. The only cure for the pine beetle: several weeks of twenty below or colder weather. The solution currently being employed to deal with the devastation of the infestation: clear cutting, clear cutting, clear cutting. I’m not sure what the replanting plan is. Perhaps BC can switch to palm trees or something.
When reading about the devastation climate change is wreaking around the globe and seeing its destructive effects in my backyard (forest fires in rain forests, anyone?), it seems impossible to overstate the tragedy we’re in the midst of. My current strategy of waking up at 3:00 a.m. several nights a week to worry about it doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful.
Perhaps a good start would be a new approach to weather reporting. Instead of reporting that unseasonably warm and sunny days are “glorious” and “beautiful”, reporters could do us a favour and refer to them as what they are: freakish and disturbing. Maybe then the magnitude of the change that threatens all of us might seem more real and immediate.
(I hope you’ll sign any petition or take part in any movement to get the current American Administration to get involved in a post-Kyoto plan in a meaningful way.)
Okay, rant over.